For a non-mocking critique of the cluelessness of the AU gang, consider this one from ever-polite KKR:
http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/15/bus...the-wrong-war/
She takes on my point from above that instead of taking on Amazon over made-up grievances, they ought to be using their fading credibility to take on real issues affecting all tradpub authors right now:
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It has been shown time and time again, in industry after industry, that when information on income and earnings is controlled by a single source, that source will bend the information to benefit the source, not the others who also earned the money. It’s not that the source is venal (although it might be). It might simply be inertia or long-existing habits and structures.
Unless pressure comes from the outside, that source will not change because it has no incentive to change.
So rather than contact the DOJ about Amazon with a complaint that completely misunderstands both the law and business, perhaps Authors United, the Authors Guild, and those who claim to care about authors’ rights should start arguing for greater transparency—from publishers, agents, managers, and anyone else who gets revenue that should go to writers.
It’s time that writers act like real business people, and start putting pressure on the organizations who control our income.
Traditional publishers have already gotten into trouble with the Department of Justice for bad business practices. It’s not hard for anyone who understands business to believe that organizations which have already proven that they’ll break the law to have a business advantage will break the law in other places as well. Companies that are willing to cut corners will look at the most vulnerable parties first, and in publishing, those parties are naïve writers, who expect honesty and get none.
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Neither the music industry nor the publishing industry has an internal reason to change its reporting structures. Those structures also benefit agents, no matter how much they complain to the press. Because a lot of agents skim. Some do it on the float, by holding money in interest-bearing accounts for as long as a month—which is, by the way, perfectly legal if the writer has agreed to it in a contract. Other agencies actually skim by “losing” payments or by taking a larger percentage than they deserve.
Even if individual agents believe that the system must change, the company they work for, the agency, will not take on this fight. It’s not in an agency’s best interest either.
Writers have to do it. And the big names should stop wasting their time and what little clout they have with things that have nothing to do with the sharp decline in traditionally published writer revenue, and go after the thing that actually has impacted writer revenue: the way that this new digital income gets reported.
I suspect I’m preaching to the choir on my blog here, and nothing will happen. But here’s my hope: someone, somewhere, will organize the big names and some writers organizations into doing something useful, like demanding that publishers have modern financial accounting to their writing partners—and not the online “reports” that some publishers have reluctantly posted. Things like this, also recommended in the Berklee study:
It should be fairly straightforward to give creators access to an app or Web page that electronically accesses real-time, in-depth, and comprehensible royalty information about their sales or plays on these platforms— data that can be reported to provide useful analytics, similar to an online banking platform—and that could conceivably offer a suite of banking services to creators if transparent revenue data was accessible. —Fair Music: Transparency and Payment Flows in the Music Industry, P. 7
I know, I know, I’m dreaming. In a world where Big Name authors believe that the platform that sells most of their books is harming them, expecting sense is probably not logical.
Ah, well. I am putting this idea out there. I do hope it makes a tiny difference.
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(Bolding mine.)
There is a lot more at the source including an in-depth look at how the *music* industry splits its money and where its debates are headed. Very useful in light of the ongoing catfights over streaming over there. Recommended.